10/07 @ 8:00pm - John Cage’s Song Books + Lecture on Nothing

ISSUE Project Room and Gisburg present a rare performance of John Cage’s extraordinary masterpiece for many voices, Song Books (1970), preceded by Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1949, published in 1959 in Silence).

A treasury of superimposed vocal solos in a wide variety of styles ranging from Indian ragas to Italian Bel Canto, Cage’s score envisions a kaleidoscopic performance layering the songs of Erik Satie, with 19th century opera excerpts and electronic theater works. Primarily utilizing texts drawn from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Buckminster Fuller and Marcel Duchamp, Cage created an anthology of 90 solos for voice (and sometimes electronics) specified and arranged using chance procedures drawn from the I Ching, producing a “happening” that revels in Zen visions of anarchy, ecology and time.

Song Books (1970)
70 min.

Performers: 
Gelsey Bell, 
Shelly Burgon,
Michael Evans,
Jessica Feldman,
Fast Forward, 
Gisburg,
Nick Hallett,
Travis Just,
John King,
Dafna Naphtali,
Robert Osborne,
Eva Jane Peck,
Loui Terrier,
Michael  V. Waller